Rebuilding of South Korea's first-generation new towns, once promised at breakneck speed with a target of residents moving in by 2030, is falling behind. Early permitting for the 15 pilot districts designated a year and a half ago has taken longer than expected, pushing the earliest groundbreaking to 2028. Even Bundang and Pyeongchon, which had been moving faster than the rest, are now jammed by artificial caps on how many units can be approved each year. Ilsan in Goyang, expected to move quickly because relocation pressure there was seen as less severe, has run into weak project economics and is stalled not only on its pilot districts but also on designating a second round of redevelopment zones. Experts say bottlenecks should at least be minimized during early permitting, since later stages such as construction cost negotiations and unit applications by association members carry plenty of their own delays.
Nine of the 15 pilot districts designated in November 2024 across the first-generation new towns of Bundang, Pyeongchon, Ilsan, Sanbon and Jungdong have completed designation as special redevelopment zones and named project operators, according to the redevelopment industry on the 9th. The Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport had originally planned to secure project implementation approvals and management disposition plans for all 15 districts this year and break ground on the first site next year. But none of the nine districts that have named operators has yet selected a designer or a construction company.
Sanbon's District 9-2, the furthest along, said it plans to begin selecting a designer and builder this month, raising expectations for the first groundbreaking next year. Most districts, however, are working toward timelines that begin in 2028 at the earliest. Bundang's Sibeom Woosung-Hyundai complex, which named its project operator in June this year, has said it will select a builder in the first half of next year, obtain project implementation approval in the fourth quarter and only begin relocation and demolition in the first quarter of 2029. "With integrated rebuilding, dividing ownership stakes among residents and negotiating construction costs alone can take more than a year," an official in the construction industry said. "The plans put out by individual complexes are blueprints at best, so even the fastest will take at least five to six years."
The bigger problem is that on top of delays in the first round of pilot districts, extreme polarization and administrative bottlenecks are emerging as early as the stage of designating follow-up districts.
Ilsan in Goyang has been held back by project economics from the first round onward. All four of its pilot districts remain at the stage of drawing up redevelopment zone plans. "Ilsan's base floor area ratio is 300%, lower than other new towns, and it is already difficult to win resident consent because people are worried about their share of the costs," an official at a nearby brokerage said. "Unlike southern Gyeonggi, where home prices are rising, prices here have been flat, which also weakens the economics." That is why only a single district covering 2,906 units applied in the second round, even though the government allocated 24,800 units to Ilsan this year to expand supply and Goyang City Hall has been accepting applications on a rolling basis. Bucheon's Jungdong was allocated 22,200 units but also drew little interest.
Bundang in Seongnam and Pyeongchon in Anyang, where the economics are sound, ran into the opposite problem: artificial caps on volume. In the second round of applications, Bundang drew 50 districts covering more than 66,000 units, over 5.5 times its allocation of 12,000 units. Pyeongchon received applications from six districts covering 14,102 units, far above its allocation of 7,200 units for the year. That leaves a considerable number of complexes with strong appetite for rebuilding and high rates of resident consent forced to halt their projects for a year or more because of the limited quota.
The market sees these annual redevelopment quotas as desk-bound administration that fails to grasp how redevelopment projects actually work. Even when districts are designated around the same time, gaps of several years open up naturally between complexes as they move through builder selection, appraisals, disputes over construction costs, and unit applications and cost assessments for association members. Critics say the government, worried in advance about a wave of relocations, is creating an unnecessary bottleneck at the outset.
Seongnam's recent formal request to the Ministry of Land, Infrastructure and Transport that the annual quotas be scrapped follows from this. The city says competition among complexes over the limited quota is intensifying, adding to friction including public complaints. "Under the existing urban redevelopment law, as a city of more than 500,000 people we designated redevelopment zones ourselves and managed the pace," a Seongnam city official said. "The special law has instead layered on redundant regulation in the form of consultation with the land ministry and approval at the metropolitan level, making the process more complicated."
An official in the redevelopment industry also said that tying up early permitting does not prevent relocations from clustering later, given that each complex has its own interests and construction conditions. "If relocation pressure is the concern, one option would be to widen the gate at the starting line — zone designation — and instead stagger permitting at the management disposition stage, when projects have matured and homes are actually torn down," the official said.
